Channels decides to stop recording with no error indication

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

I have noticed it so far only on NFL Football games, but that is generally the only LONG recordings I make. For the last month or so, EVERY NFL football game I have recorded has been exactly 121 minutes long. I have the pass set to add an additional 120 minutes to the game in case it goes into OT (excessive, but.. whatever!) so this has led me to believe (but I have no proof) that it thinks the games are 1 minute long, and it's adding the 120 minutes.

Last night, I was watching the 8pm game as it was recording, and I watched the entire thing with zero issues, but this time for some reason, the recording this morning is 47 minutes long, so this is the first anomaly I have noticed from the 121 minutes. There isn't' any notice that "The recording was interrupted", etc.. It just seems to be happy showing me only 121 (or 47 this time) minutes. When I go to the web client and look at the debug log for this recording I see:
at=2024-11-10T20:14:30.6225684-05:00 loc=0 skipped=172
at=2024-11-10T20:14:30.6236202-05:00 loc=198700 pkt=1057 pid=48 what=pat_and_pmt offset=100376 length=98512 contiguous=false changed=true packets=2
at=2024-11-11T00:30:00.2617784-05:00 indexer=ads edl="unsupported value type" disconts="unsupported value type"

I wont claim to understand what it's saying, but it seems to indicate it was at least still working on this recording until 12:30am, which would seem to line up with the expected length plus 120 minutes.

It happens no matter what game, team, channel, source, etc. I have deleted all of my NFL passes and recreated them only for a few teams. The game last night, I set to record manually, and wasn't included in any of the passes I recreated, so it doesn't seem like a pass problem.

Where else can I look for hints? Anyone else ever see this?

TIA!
Steve

#2

Where do you record NFL from?

#3

Generally just an HDHomerun connected antenna although I do have a couple TVE sources that would have overlapping channels, such as Dishnet. I have experimented with changing the source priority to see if that changes anything, but it did not seem to.

1 Like
#4

Are you hitting a size limit for your files? What are their file sizes? FAT32 formatted hard drives have small limits for file sizes. You should make sure your storage drive is formatted to NTFS or EXFAT.

#5

FAT32 maximum file size is 4,294,967,295 bytes ( 2³² - 1)

#6

Thank you - Yes, it's not a file size problem. Even the shortened videos were over 8gb, and while I did check that, I didn't expect it to be the problem since it had previously worked for years.

I do think I may have found something though. I did find that I was inadvertently running backups during the day multiple times (I have a powershell script scheduled by task scheduler that I had changed the schedule for testing, but didn't change back).

The times dont line up or make sense completely, but I could see that impacting it in some way, and I did get Monday Night Football to record completely last night, so it could have been it. I need to head out to work, but I think I will schedule some long recordings (movies, football reruns) today and see if those work, then schedule one that runs at 3am when I am doing my actual intentional backups and see if it does correlate.
-Steve

#7

If it happens again, would need to know what source and channel it recorded from and what the DVR log shows for the recording from the time it started recording until it finished processing the recording.

Where are you viewing the duration of the recording (that shows it too short)?

#8

I am seeing the duration in the client on FireTV, and on the web page. I also watched the file directly with VLC and it ends where it says it does.

Hopefully it wont happen again, but figuring out the source has been something I struggle with. When I have the same channel available on multiple sources, I dont think I've found where to see which one it actually recorded from. If you could let me know that, and where to get the DVR logs you're talking about, that would help. The only things I saw were the logs on the recording which I posted above for this one specific example, but it was only those 3 lines. I expected to see more!

Thanks for the help!!

#9

I do all my admin/troubleshooting using the DVR web UI.
When you view the recording it will say which channel it recorded from.
The DVR log will also tell you which channel and source it was recorded from.

You can view Channels DVR log from the DVR web UI.
Support > Logs
By default, it displays the last 1500 lines in the log.
To see more lines in the log https://getchannels.com/docs/getting-started/faqs/subscription/#how-can-i-view-more-of-the-channels-dvr-server-log

#10

That's the debug recording log.
For an HDHR tuner source, it's only 3 lines.
For a TVE or Custom M3U channel source, it will be huge!

#11

I wanted to return to this thread and at give some closure. It appears that the problem had something to do with my backups of my proxmox servers (channels running on windows VM).. Not sure why, but when I adjusted the time to insure no interruption during the long recordings I care about, it's been fine ever since. Thanks to all that helped.

#12

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